


Loved, Dreamt Of, Sought

by SnitchesAndTalkers



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Cinderella AU, Jokes Only Cat Owners Will Understand, Love at First Transformation Spell, M/M, Strangers to Fall Out Boy, fairytale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 08:05:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18656353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnitchesAndTalkers/pseuds/SnitchesAndTalkers
Summary: If there's one thing Patrick wishes for, it's a band.If there's one thing Pete can do, it's grant wishes.A retelling of Cinderella in which the princess does not want a handsome prince and the Faerie Godperson can't get the magic quite right.





	Loved, Dreamt Of, Sought

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my goodness, so, Once Upon a Peterick has been in the planning stages for... oh, about fifteen months, possibly a little more. And I spent like, fourteen of those months convinced I was going to write a Beauty and the Beast hiatus fic. And then I switched to this. So, you know, sorry if you're a big Beauty and the Beast fan, but maybe you'll enjoy this instead?
> 
> This is the story of how Cinderella wanted to go to the Battle of the Bands, and his Faerie Godperson didn't really plan out the finer details...

Once upon a time, in the city of Chicago…

Well, that’s how it’s supposed to start, isn’t it? It starts with a princess.

No, wait. That’s not right.

It starts with a _dilemma_. With a maiden – because it’s always a maiden and she’s usually in peril and she’s _always_ beautiful and her father, inexplicably, wants to sell her to the highest bidder. Wait, what was the point? Oh yes, the maid in mortal danger, the damsel in distress. That’s how it starts. Then it’s solved by a prince (handsome, of course) who resolves it with a kiss and they all live…

Slow down, that’s not the best part.

 _This_ starts in the foyer of the kind of venue that hasn’t been cool since 1987. It starts with a broom – or  a mop, no one can really figure it out, both tools are so filthy, so worn-through with age and misuse that they look the same now – and a man in jeans with holes at the knees. The cosmos has a great sense of humor because he’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, even remotely princess-like.

It starts with a poster on a wall.

A poster that Patrick, the not-princess, has been staring at for the past ten minutes. This is intense staring, championship level, the kind that makes his eyes ache until he adjust his glasses and shifts his hat to the back of his hat so he can peer under the peak. _All the better to see you with, my dear._

It starts with ten minutes of careful consideration. He knows this to be a fact because Will — bar administrator and the closest thing Patrick has to a friend — calls across the lobby, “Patrick, you’ve been staring at that poster for like, an hour, dude,” and Will is prone to wild displays of exaggeration, so it’s definitely only been ten minutes.

Slowly, Patrick blinks and slips back into his skin, back into the room. Like the moment that fog gives way, like the dawn breaking – bright and golden – over the lake on a summer morning, Patrick descends from wherever it was he went and sinks back to a bucket of filthy, half-cold water.

“This poster,” he begins softly, rubbing his fingertips over the paper and feeling the crevasses and mountain ranges of exposed breezeblock just behind, “this poster was _not here_ this morning.”

Will looks at him. Then, he looks at the several hundred posters pasted to the walls of the lobby. It’s clear that Will is wondering if Patrick is experiencing some kind of… _episode,_ and, if so, what his role in dealing with it ought to be. When he speaks, his voice is worried, as though the possibility of keeping track of the posters being part of his job description is just occurring to him, and he says, “I honestly don’t keep an inventory of the posters on the wall. _Should_ I? God, I’m paid like, five bucks an hour, that’s _not enough_ to make me keep track of the posters.”

The boss doesn’t believe in minimum wage. He thinks that paying minimum wage leads to an upswing in left-wing liberalism and, although he’s happy to prop the doors open and trade on punk rock and socialism screamed through a mic, he’s less happy about things like unionized workforces, company healthcare plans and paid personal days. There’s a hole in Patrick’s shoe that is testament to the boss’s principles; it leaks and lets in mop water.

“No, but look!” Patrick insists. “It’s not even for the bar! It’s for that venue place a couple blocks away, Angels and Kings?”

It is fair to say that Patrick is looking for a distraction. He is not really mopping, because that would require hot water and cleaning products and, given the state of the place, the tenacity of Sisyphus and, God knows, Patrick has none of those things. This is not so much cleaning as moving the dirt from one place to the other via the medium of the last withered scraps clinging to the shank. He’s unsure if they’re softened bristles or hardened fabric.

He’s unsure which one is more unsanitary.

“I’m struggling to figure out why this is your – and, apparently, by extension, _my_ – problem, right now,” Will sighs. “It’s just a poster, quit playing with it and do some work before he gets back and cuts your paycheck for goofing off.”

Patrick props his chin on the broom handle and stares at the poster. There’s something compelling about it, some magic or trick of the light that bleeds through the ink on the page and makes him meditative. “I just think it’s a little strange,” he says quietly, “don’t you think it’s a _tiny bit_ strange that the boss is authorizing promotion of other venues? He doesn’t even promote _this_ venue. I swear to God, he’s going to trade off on that one time Motley Crue played here until the bank forecloses.”

“Maybe he didn’t authorize it,” Will shrugs. He turns his back on Patrick and the poster and applies due diligence to ignoring the cash register. As if he believes, if he keeps both Patrick and the poster out of his line of sight, they no longer exist and can definitely not be mistaken for his problem. “Maybe someone just stuck it up there while no one was looking. Which is definitely none of _our_ business.”

“Hmm,” says Patrick, and he looks at the poster once more. “Who would sneak in _here?_ We’re basically the only people who come here on a regular basis and that’s only because we’re literally paid to be here.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it just… appeared. Like magic. I can’t begin to explain to you how much I do not care about the provenance of the poster.”

 _We’re having a ball,_ the poster says on copier paper in courier font, typed over a mic picked out by a single spotlight, _Angels and Kings, June 4_ _th_ _. Flyer admits one — myspace.com/princesbecomekings._

Behind him, Will is humming softly to himself, counting out tickets or organizing post-it notes or whatever it is that Will is paid to do while Patrick mops. Beneath Patrick’s skin, his blood begins to prickle, as if the fine hairs on his arm have inverted down through his skin and are standing on end.

He watches Will carefully as he reaches up and subtly eases the poster from the wall. It’s been tacked there with bubblemint gum that is, disgustingly, still _warm_ from someone’s mouth. There is no way he’s going to think about that as he shoves it down into his pocket. He grabs the broom/mop (the brop?) and resumes shifting the dirt from one corner to the other.

“I saw that,” says Will. “Does that count as theft?”

Patrick grins, “Not if it doesn’t belong to the boss.”

***

“Look, kid, I don’t know how else to say this to you, but it’s a battle of the _bands_. No acoustic sets, no backing tracks. Unless you’re gonna make like Dick Van Dyke and strap a kick drum to your ass…”

“But I need that spot!” Patrick objects into his phone as he paces back and forth in the apartment.

“I don’t know what to tell you, kiddo, don’t you have, like, _roommates_ or something who could help you out?”

Neither of the guys who were _supposed_ to be rooming with Patrick have actually shown up. Instead, on the sofa when Patrick arrived, were two large tom cats — one rich, velvet brown with an enormously fluffy tail, the other a sleek ginger tabby who does _not_ like ham. They seem to like him and, in exchange for their company, he buys them premium cat food while he eats ramen.

Patrick named them Joe and Andy because he’s not particularly adept at naming cats.

Joe and Andy sit on the couch, watching him move with interested vigour, like this is the US Open and he’s Serena Williams _and_ Maria Sharapova.

“You can’t — there’s nothing on the flyer that says solo artists can’t take part.”

“Oh, you’re a _solo artist_ now?” The organizer of this battle is something of a dick. “Cool. Cool, cool. I thought you were a drummer with no friends — uh, band. I meant band.”

That is _unfairly_ close to the bone.

Patrick scrapes a hand through his hair. His reflection in the uncurtained window is wild-eyed, feverish. He is, possibly, considering strapping a kick drum to his ass. He wheedles desperately. “What if I can get a band together before the competition?”

“And what if you _can’t?”_ The organizer — who said his name is Gabe Something-Or-Other — sighs like he wants to help out but has hands tied by bureaucratic red tape. Or is it bandocratic? “Then I’ve got an open spot and nothing to fill it.”

“Listen,” Patrick says, instead of making the obvious dirty joke, “ _listen_ , you don’t understand, I _need_ this.”

Gabe Something-Or-Other falls silent and so does Patrick. They’re breathing together, staticky and out of time. Patrick’s lungs are doing unusual things in his chest, his heart spasming like he’s on the brink of cardiac arrest, whereas Gabe’s breaths are slow and even, soft on the other end of the line. There is no way for Patrick to explain to this stranger how much he wants this, how he needs it in ways no one else possibly can, how the knowledge of the poster has replaced all blood and bone and viscera in his body and now he’s nothing but music waiting to get out. He’s concerned, every time he opens his mouth, that nothing but melody is going to pour from him. He’s desperate with the need to allow it, to share it. Every part of that sounds completely insane so he bites his tongue until he tastes iron and prays that Gabe won’t just hang up on him.

“Alright,” says Gabe eventually. “Okay, you’ve got guts… _tenacity._ I admire that.” Patrick’s reflection looks close to emotional collapse, eyes bugging out unattractively, cheeks flushed up with blood and fire and song. No one starts a sentence that way and then follows it up with ‘now fuck off’, but Patrick is prepared to accept that there is always a first time. “I can hold your spot, kid. Get yourself a band and you’re in.”

There is nothing dignified about the way Patrick’s reflection slides to the floor and whimpers into the mouthpiece. “Are you serious? Oh my God. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

“Please,” says Gabe. “Just — You don’t have to do that. At all. That’s a thing you definitely don’t have to do. In fact, if you barf down the phone, I rescind all previous offers because you are _not_ barfing at my show.”

 _“Your_ show?” says Patrick absently. He is trying very hard to force down the bubbling rise of puke at the back of his throat, his mouth flooded with the sharp, pre-chunder swell of spit. The adrenaline is wearing off, you see, and now it’s occurring to him that he has just called up the organizer of a city-wide event and, essentially, browbeaten him into offering his non-existent band a spot. This is not good for his social anxiety. Everything that Patrick has eaten for the past twenty-four hours is making a desperate, unified bid for freedom.

“Didn’t I say?” asks Gabe Something-Or-Other. “It’s _my_ band you’re battling to tour with.”

Yes, this is Gabe Saporta of Midtown. Fantastic.

“Oh,” Patrick murmurs faintly, “that’s — that’s just super.”

He is almost certain he hangs up before he throws up into a conveniently placed potted fern.

***

“William,” Patrick says seriously — so, so seriously — head tipped to back so he can clear the height difference and meet Will’s eyes. “I am _begging_ you here, dude. Please be in my band.”

Will raises an eyebrow. This is annoying, because Patrick would like, very much, to be able to raise a single eyebrow. Imagine the expression he could inject into his daily interactions. Instead, Patrick is blessed with the ability to sweat through any shirt he owns, which is, like, _way less_ visually appealing. Will, however, uses his powers for evil and says, “ _What_ band?”

 _Dick_ , Patrick wants to say, but doesn’t.

“That’s the problem,”Patrick says eagerly. “I have a Four Point Plan. Right now, I’m just a loser with a drum kit, but if you would help me out, like a good friend, then we’d be a loser with a drum kit _and_ a loser with a microphone. This might assist us with point one: attracting losers with guitars. _Then_ we have a band, then we win the battle of the bands and then it’s like...” Patrick trails off. He does not have a point four in his four point master plan. He shrugs helplessly. “You know?”

“That’s the Four Point Plan, yeah?” Will asks, shoving his hair behind his ears and going right back to _not_ carrying out stock inventory. “It only has three points. God, that must’ve really kept you up all night.”

It did, actually, but Patrick is smart enough to recognize sarcasm at least eighty percent of the time. So, he flips Will off and then remembers he needs him on side and backpedals with all the strength and ferocity of Lance Armstrong. “I’m asking you this as a favor to our friendship.”

“Hmm,” says Will. He’s got this smile on his face, his mouth tucked up at the corner as he picks idly at his fingernails. “Keep talking.”

“We will be _so cool,”_ Patrick informs him. Patrick, who has never been _so cool_ in his life. Patrick who is not even on nodding terms in the hallways with _so cool_. Patrick, whose universal space-time relationship with _so cool_ is so distant that the Hubble Spacecraft would give up and go home before locating the correlation. He allows his mouth to continue spilling filthy lies, because if Will disagrees, then he’s going to have to go home and get to work on strapping that kick drum to his ass. “It worked for The White Stripes!”

This is, clearly, the wrong thing to say. Will pulls this face like he’s sucking on a whole mouthful of Warheads, his lips puckered up in distaste. He spits, “Stop talking. Stop talking _immediately.”_

“Okay, so, here’s the thing,” Patrick swings a one-eighty that most members of the senate would be proud of, “in that case, I need you to _stop_ me from sounding like The White Stripes.”

Will gives all the appearance of a man giving this particular scenario a great deal of introspection. That is to say, if he frowns thoughtfully any harder, he’s running a real risk of going cross-eyed. Good things do not happen to Patrick, a truth held self-evident and worth bearing in mind, but still, this could be the turning point. He holds his breath and feels his heart throbbing hopeful-desperate against his ribs and bites his lip and crosses his fingers behind his back tight enough that he cuts off the circulation.

Good things don’t happen to Patrick.

But still.

Will takes an unnecessarily deep breath. And then, because Will is a very good friend, the kind of friend who wouldn’t leave someone he cares about in the lurch in this awful, desperate way, he gusts out a sigh and nods. “Okay, fine. I’ll be in your two man band. But we’re Simon and Garfunkel, _not_ The White Stripes”

“Beckett and Stump,” Patrick agrees, nodding eagerly. “Bump!”

Will groans. “Oh God. You are not naming us.”

Us. Patrick has a band. Well, Patrick is one member closer to having a band than he was ten minutes ago and, at this point, he will not look a gift vocalist in the mouth.

“Whatever, wait until Bump goes platinum.”

***

Will calls him at 8 the morning of the show. The only reason he knows it’s Will — and he has to check three times, just to be sure — is because of the name on the screen of his phone. Will has strep.

It’s twelve hours until the competition and Will can’t make himself heard over a phone line. There’s an _I told you so_ that Patrick wants to spit about Will examining the tonsils of random scene boys and girls at the bar. The unfairness of it is bitter on Patrick’s tongue and, as he curls his knees to his chest and presses his knuckles to his eyelids, he can _taste_ the injustice. People like Patrick are not allowed to dream.

But Patrick is a good friend so he says he’ll cover Will’s shift at the weekend and he tells him to get some rest and he even offers to bring him popsicles and alphabet soup and cough candy. Then he hangs up the phone and sobs into his hands for ten solid minutes. Isn’t this life, though? Partisan and biased and so fucking _unfair_ that Patrick wants to scrape out his guts in frustration.

It turns out that ten minutes is just long enough for his day to not only touch rock bottom, but to find a way to begin digging through bedrock. His phone lights up with a text message.

 _Your leave is canceled tonight,_ texts the boss, _someone needs to clean out the basement at the bar and it’s not like you have anything better to do._

There is, suddenly, a scar on Patrick’s bedroom wall, the same shape as his cell phone. There’s a thick, copper-spittle-and-lymph taste at the back of his throat from the raw depths of his scream.

Joe peers into the room uncertainly, tail upright, ears perked. “Mrrp?” he says, carefully, concerned.

“The only reason I don’t go home to Glenview,” Patrick tells him seriously, “is that I’m pretty sure you’d starve to death.”

***

In a fairytale, this wouldn’t be happening. In a fairytale there would be a prince and a white horse and a dramatic rescue. But this is not a fairytale and Patrick is mopping, taking on water through the pockmarked soles of his converse so he _squelch, squelch, squelches_ across the floor. The basement smells of decay and the ghost of spilled beer and cigarette smoke. Patrick feels small and stupid and wonders if Gabe will even miss him on the roster.

The room is illuminated by a single, bare lightbulb, swinging from the ceiling. Patrick downs his mop for a moment and shifts a stack of crates two feet to the left, praying as he always does that there won’t be roaches, rats, or anything else with too many teeth or too many legs. He turns back and freezes. There is a man sitting on the floor of the basement. He blinks, very rapidly, and wonders if it’s possible that he’s developed sudden-onset narcolepsy and he is, in fact, passed out cold on the filthy floor and having an out of body experience.

Nothing changes.

There is still a man sitting on the floor of the basement.

The man is, Patrick notes somehow through the mind-altering terror, stupidly handsome, with warm copper eyes, high cheekbones, an angular jaw and the most incredible thick, soft mouth Patrick has ever seen. It’s flat, the mouth, downturned slightly at the corners. It makes him look Byronic, brooding, possibly murderous.

Honestly, Patrick’s living one of the most disappointing days of his life so far. The fact he’s about to be murdered by a short, unfairly gorgeous maniac with too much product in his bangs is the dramatic cherry on his terrible sadness cake. Still, he screams like a champ because apparently these things are instinct. He brandishes the broom shank as an afterthought.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demands, his voice sliding all the way up through his register. It’s a good demand. Strong. He ruins it immediately by falling into a whimper. “And like… could you go away? Please?”

The dude seems remarkably unfazed by both the shriek and the broom, stretching out his legs and admiring his shoes. Patrick is mildly annoyed — for they are truly hideous shoes — and shakes it harder. The dude looks up with a blinding grin and wiggles four fingers in a dorky, disarming little wave.

“Hi.”

“Get back,” says Patrick with a jab in the stranger’s direction. It’s pointless, he hasn’t moved from the floor, but Patrick feels it’s probably best to make himself appear aggressive. Like when you encounter a bear on the trail, something about increasing the size of your silhouette in order to intimidate apex predators. Not that Patrick has ever encountered a bear. Or a trail. He takes another swing. “I said get back!”

“I _am_ back,” the stranger points out. “I’m all the way back over here.”

Patrick frowns. This is not how he imagined his first robbery or only murder would go down. There is significantly less violence and far more guyliner. He glares at the spot on the floor by the crates and wonders, again, if he’s actually passed out or hallucinating. A leaking beer tap, maybe? _That_ could cause some kind of... Wait, what are the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning again?

“You’re not tripping balls,” says the guy, which is fantastic because Patrick’s either letting his internal monologue pour out or the dude is psychic. Neither of those are particularly reassuring options. Whoever he is, he climbs to his feet with the lithe grace of a ballet dancer and moves three steps forward. “I’m here to help you.”

In response, Patrick attempts to backpedal. Unfortunately, he has nowhere to go but through — or _up_ — the wall directly behind him. He is willing to attempt to scale it backwards, using nothing but his hands, like a fucking trucker hat wearing Spiderman, if it gets him away from this disturbingly friendly psychopath. “Stay away from me!” he shrieks. “I’m warning you!”

“Do you want to calm down a little?” the stranger asks irritably. “God, it’s not like I’m a _goblin_ or something. I’m not here to hurt you!”

Patrick channels his inner Skywalker and takes a few more warning swings. “That’s exactly what someone who was going to hurt me would say!”

“Okay, listen, I’m Peter,” says… Peter, apparently. Peter who is clearly so used to manifesting in the center of bar basements that he doesn’t even apologize for it. “But you should probably call me Pete.”

“The only thing I’m calling is the cops, asshole! Get the fuck out of here!”

Disconcertingly, Pete does no such thing. In fact, he is so clearly _not_ going to follow Patrick’s instructions that, instead, he settles himself comfortably against a stack of crates and withdraws a hip flask from his pocket. He takes a long swig and then smacks his lips. Before Patrick can set about beating him to death with the broom shank, Pete holds it out like an international peace treaty and says, “You want some? If anyone looks like they could use a drink, it’s you. It’s good! It’s, uh... okay, it’s mostly absinthe. There’s like, a pretty good reason they call it the green fairy.”

Patrick’s mother has instilled into him from a very young age that he is not to accept offers of candy from strangers. He holds a master’s degree in Stranger Danger, obtained at the Glenview School of Nineties Childhood Safety PSAs.  If Patricia Stump believed for a second that this advice would extend into her youngest son’s late teens she would, without a shadow of a doubt, have included peculiar men named Peter offering intoxicating beverages of unknown pedigree. Slowly, Patrick shakes his head.

“No thank you,” he says, very formally. Then, because Pete does nothing more than shrug and mutter ‘have it your way’ and doesn’t do anything suspicious like, say, reaching for a concealed weapon or revealing he’s a stripogram or moving towards Patrick _at all,_ Patrick continues cautiously. “I’m going to like, lower my weapon. Don’t make any sudden moves and don’t, you know, try anything funny.” What, exactly, Pete could do that would be funny is not immediately clear.  A short piece of improv comedy, perhaps? A Three Stooges skit involving the mop bucket? Patrick has no idea. “We cool?”

“Yeah man, we’re cool,” Pete confirms idly. He is not intimidated by Patrick’s broom shank in the slightest. “Damn, you’re not exactly making this easy, are you?”

“What, exactly, do you want me to make easy?” Patrick asks savagely. “You bursting in here and murdering me? _To death?”_

“How else would I murder you, if not to death?” Pete asks, puzzled. This is not the reassurance that Patrick needs right now and he jabs the broom shank in Pete’s direction once more. “Okay, okay, keep your tighty whities on, I’m not gonna fucking murder you, dude. Do I look like a serial killer to you?”

Pete is dressed in a bright purple hoodie and lime green pants. His red t-shirt says _I’ll Seelie You in Court_. In pink glitter. There are at least two inches of flat, tanned stomach on display between the bottom of the shirt and the top of the pants. There is a distracting, _enticing_ break of ink between his hip bones, just beneath his navel and right above his… Patrick shakes his head, Etch-a-Sketch style, to stop himself from thinking about this probably-murderous man’s genitals. Moving swiftly on.

TL:DR? Patrick has never knowingly _met_ a serial killer therefore, he supposes, there’s no reason to suggest that they _don’t_ look like Pete.

“Uh, maybe?” he says. He’s pretty sure he’s still staring at the tattoo.

Pete sighs. “Okay, honestly? Like, three hundred years ago, everyone was _way_ cooler with me just showing up unannounced. Does _no one_ believe in magic anymore?”

Magic. Oh, _fuck this._ Patrick is convinced at this point that Pete is fucking with him, toying with him, tenderizing his gray matter before he sucks it from his ear with a straw behind the dumpsters in the alley out back. Mentally sound people don’t sneak around deserted bars in the dark and hide in the basement waiting for unsuspecting members of staff to descend the steps. This is not normal behaviour. None of this is reasonable.

Pete continues to ramble. “The whole twentieth century was just one big headache for guys like me, you know? I mean, there was a brief renaissance in the sixties, but that was mostly LSD. Now? With the internet, cable television, _Hallmark movies?_ It’s a dying business, my dude, very sad.”

Very faintly, Patrick says, “Three hundred years? Oh. That’s — that sounds reasonable. And normal. Hey, do you, like… have someone I can call to come pick you up? Maybe a friend? A loved one? A medical professional?”

“I knew you’d be difficult,” Pete sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, like _Patrick_ is the one with a problem here, like _Patrick_ is the one who broke into the place and set about terrorizing members of staff who are, by the way, not paid nearly enough to deal with this level of bullshit. “Patrick, listen—”

“How the fuck,” says Patrick carefully, his synapses linking and looping and forming all sorts of outrageous conclusions about stalkers and Wikipedia articles in which he is _fourteenth victim, Patrick Stump, found in the crawl space of his workplace,_ “do you know my name?”

“Yes,” Pete nods sagely. _“That’s_ the important question to ask here.”

They stare at one another as Patrick opens his mouth to retort. Unfortunately, he has no snappy last words, so he closes it again and concentrates on the shadows on the wall behind Pete’s head. He imagined that, when facing death, he would feel something noble. Brave acceptance, maybe. Instead, he just feels kind of hot and pissed and irritable. He crosses the room on legs that don’t seem to be responding to any part of his screaming internal monologue about Chicago crime statistics and, very deliberately, he pokes Pete in the center of his sparkly, screen-printed chest.

“Fuck you.”

“Ouch,” says Pete, looking hurt. “What was that for?”

“I have been taking shit from everyone ever since I moved to this stupid city,” Patrick declares in a low, even tone. He has no idea who is controlling his vocal cords, or his fingers as he jabs them into Pete’s chest once more. “You have thirty seconds to explain what the fuck you are doing in my workplace and why the fuck you know my name and I suggest you make it good unless you want to work out how to leave with this broom shoved _all the way_ up your—”

“Okay, everyone take a breath.” Pete looks for all the world as if Patrick is being completely unreasonable. Patrick lowers his pointing finger from Pete’s left nipple (Pierced. Interesting. _Distracting._ But interesting.) but he does not loosen his hold on the broom. “I’ve been… watching you, Patrick.”

Patrick blinks. That is not comforting. “That’s not comforting,” he informs Pete hysterically. “You aren’t helping yourself _not_ get punched in the dick. Watching me? Why — why would you be watching me? Watching me do what? Have you been watching me in the bathroom? Or, like — when I have my laptop in my room, because, hand to God, I clicked that pop-up accidentally.”

“No, Patrick, I haven’t been watching you masturbate,” Pete says with long-suffering patience. Patrick’s sigh of relief is heartfelt and audible. “I’m here to help you with the battle of the bands.”

In all of this nausea-inducing excitement, somehow, Patrick forgot the battle of the bands was even a thing he was sad about. It bolts back to him like a power surge, a violent electrical explosion of _bandsmusicstagecareerfreedom_ that shivers down to his fingertips like the crackle of static in the air after lightning _._ He has never hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness before, but his lungs seem to think today might be a great opportunity to give it a whirl.

“With the…” Patrick trails off. “I feel like I’m missing important information, here.”

“Alright,” says Pete briskly. “I’m your Faerie Godperson, and I’m here to take you to the ball. Now, did you say you had some pet cats?”

Patrick is pretty sure he’s said no such thing. He shakes his head mutely and wonders what he’s done in this or any previous lives to deserve this. He’s a good kid, he provided a solid line of B grades in high school, never sass-mouthed his mom and picked up groceries for his grandma. There must be something in the constitution about this, he’s almost certain it qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment.

“You’re insane,” he says confidently. Then, he adds, less confidently. “Uh, or I am… I don’t know. They do say the person having a nervous breakdown is the last one to figure it out.”

“You’re not insane and we have to leave, like, ten minutes ago,” Pete declares. Patrick has a horrible feeling he’s about to peer-pressured into this.

A voice that sounds a lot like Patrick’s and seems to be coming from Patrick’s mouth but has received no permission to launch from his brain whimpers pathetically, “But I have to clean the basement.”

“I can help with that,” Pete shrugs and begins rummaging inside of his hoodie. Presumably, Patrick thinks spitefully, looking for his magic fucking _wand_.

“With _magic?”_ he asks sarcastically. “You’re going to conjure up a whole army of sentient cleaning appliances like a _real_ Faerie Godperson? I’ve seen Fantasia, isn’t that how this is supposed to go down?”

“No,” Pete straightens up and holds something aloft. “With this.”

Patrick boggles at him. It beeps cheerfully as Pete sets it down on the floor. It is somewhat disconcerting to imagine that he can be usurped by a $300 electrical appliance. “Is that a fucking _Roomba?”_

“What? You think everything requires magical bullshit?” asks Pete, clapping Patrick on the shoulder and then striding off towards the steps. “Let’s go.”

“I… Oh… But...”

Pete pauses at the top of the steps but he does not turn around. Instead, he makes an impatient, crooked finger in Patrick’s direction and whistles sharply through his teeth. “Yo, small, blond, and fiersome? Try to keep up. We don’t have a lot of time.”

To recap: Pete materialized in the basement not two minutes ago with no prior warning. He claims to be over three hundred years old and also believes he is Patrick’s Faerie Godperson, a fact that cannot possibly be true given that faeries are _not real._ There is literally no reason whatsoever that Patrick should follow him, given the above and also that Patrick is currently halfway through a shift in a job that allows him to do fun things like ‘eat’ and ‘not be homeless’. All of this is fairly compelling evidence in favor of him locking the basement door behind Pete and chalking this all up to a bad burrito at lunch.

On the other hand, Patrick would like to see a little more of that tattoo. And, _possibly_ , find out if Pete is pierced in any other places, aside from his nipple. Purely in the interest of science.

At least if they go outside, he reasons, there’s a possibility his inevitable murder will have witnesses.

***

They are halfway back to the apartment before Patrick really begins to question the intelligence of showing Pete where he lives. This is a man who believes he is a Faerie Godperson, and carries around Roombas in his skin-tight hoodie, and learns the name of the dude who cleans up puke in a non-entity of a bar. To be fair, though, Patrick has made a whole host of questionable decisions since he yanked the poster from the wall and peeled the sticky, mouth-warm bubblegum from the corner. It doesn’t seem like making one more is really going to hurt at this point.

Plus, Pete seems remarkably confident about where he’s going, like some kind of scene king homing pigeon, dodging his way down alleyways, creating shortcuts that definitely didn’t exist yesterday. Patrick’s out of breath, two of his own strides matching one of Pete’s, hurrying alongside him and swearing that he’ll begin a cardio regime on Monday.

Assuming Pete _doesn’t_ murder him. That is still a very real possibility.

“Well,” Patrick begins hesitantly as they approach the building. This is his last chance to throw some big diversion, to shout out ‘Look! A distraction!’ and then make a run for it towards the park, or the El, or onto the first bus that passes by. He realizes that to make his escape in a cab would be a) more efficient and b) far cooler but, honestly, a cab fare? In _this_ economy? He’ll have to take his chances with public transit. “Here we are.”

“Second star to the left,” says Pete mysteriously, looking up at the building. “Oh, that’s good.”

Patrick follows his gaze and realizes that, yes, his bedroom window _is_ the second to the right, the only light twinkling in a dead constellation of empty units. That’s… not something he’s noticed before. He clears his throat and squeaks out, “Yeah. I — I guess so.”

“Okay, music man,” Pete claps his hands together. “Let’s go fix you up.”

Yeah, Patrick’s pretty sure Pete’s going to be wearing his skin by this time tomorrow.

They climb the stairs in silence; Pete’s is apparently unfazed, Patrick’s is entirely terrified. He hopes Joe and Andy are trained attack cats, although given the way Joe hides from spiders, he suspects that isn’t the case. Of course, they immediately show that they have no loyalty and swarm over Pete the moment Patrick opens the door.

“Cats,” says Pete knowledgeably. As though Patrick might mistake them for llamas.

Patrick nods agreeably. “Yes. Joe and Andy.”

“Those are very unusual names for cats.”

“They’re very unusual cats.”

“I knew you had cats,” Pete continues, scratching Joe behind the ears. Joe, for his part, looks moments away from blissful collapse, his purr so loud it drowns out the rattle of the El beyond the windows. “I can work with cats. You know what’s a bitch to work with? Fucking _mice_. Can’t do much with mice. Cats, though? Cats are great…”

“Are you…” Patrick trails off. “Are you an animal trainer or something?”

Pete rolls his eyes like this is the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. Which, _clearly,_ it isn’t, because he told Patrick ten minutes ago that he’s a Faerie Godperson. “No, Patrick, I’m not an animal trainer. Okay, let’s get started. Take off your clothes.”

Of all the turns Patrick imagined this conversation taking, that was definitely not one of them. He’s aware that he’s opening and closing his mouth silently, gaping at Pete as he reclines back on the couch. Was all of… _this_ , some kind of elaborately staged pick up line? It’s not that Patrick has a long and illustrious career of being picked up with which to reference and analyze their interactions so far. He is, after all, a baby from the suburbs, maybe it’s common practice to hit on dudes sweeping basements by presenting them with Roombas here in the big city.

He clears his throat carefully. “Okay, here’s the thing. You seem like a nice dude, honestly, I’m like, _super_ grateful you haven’t killed me or my cats since we arrived back here, that’s pretty rad. And, you know, uh — you’re obviously very good-looking so, maybe if we went out to like, a movie or something first, then I could possibly re-evaluate and—”

Pete looks nonplussed. “What?”

“Oh,” the surface of Mordor has got nothing on the temperature of Patrick’s face, “I just thought… Uh – _Why_ , exactly, am I taking off my clothes?”

“Okay, fine,” Pete interrupts. His eye roll is audible. Patrick hopes he pulls a muscle. “I’ll just… work with what you’re wearing. Make it… acceptable.”

Patrick looks down. He can see his knees and a reasonably large amount of his thighs through the rips in his jeans. The shirt he’s wearing has sweat stains not dissimilar to a map of a fantasy kingdom drawn by an enthusiastic but unskilled 8-year-old. His converse still have holes. Still, he lies gamely, “I look fine.”

“Meow,” says Andy bitchily. It has a distinctly unpleasant edge to it.

“You’re absolutely right,” Pete whispers to Andy, like the cat just said anything but _meow_. “But you shouldn’t say it out loud. Rude much?”

“What did he say?” Patrick asks plaintively, momentarily forgetting that Andy is a _cat_ and he just said _meow_. “Listen, you fluffy little asshole, you know who buys your food, right?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pete shrugs airily and rises to his feet, assessing Patrick like a tailor. “Alright, let’s take a look. Good bone structure, we should draw attention to that,” he yanks off Patrick’s hat and tosses it onto the couch; manfully, Patrick resists the urge to throw him from the third story window, “who cuts your hair? Your _mom?”_

 _“Sometimes!”_ Patrick yelps. It’s been a while since she did it last, he blows coppery wisps out of his eyes and scowls. “That’s a thing she _sometimes_ does!”

“Of course.”

“What does my hair have to do with anything? I thought we were going to the battle of the bands.”

“Can’t have a band without a front man,” Pete says. His fingers are hot against Patrick’s face, glowing heat that sinks down through skin and sinew and settles into Patrick’s bones. He is liquid beneath his skin, his insides soft as ice cream. It is not unlike the afterglow of a particularly good orgasm. “Can’t have a front man without a haircut.”

There are many things Patrick thinks he ought to say, questions he should ask, strange men he should forcibly remove from his apartment. All that comes out when he opens his mouth, however, is a soft, resonant little groan.

“The sideburns have to go,” Pete continues, tilting up Patrick’s chin and turning him quickly from side to side.

 _“Go?_ Go _where?”_

He cups Patrick’s face in both hands. This is the most bizarre moment of Patrick’s life, standing in the center of his living room while an impossibly handsome and overly familiar stranger strokes his face, his cheeks, his hair. He feels like a Mento in Diet Coke, fizzing all over his skin, his hair prickling at his nape. He woozes into Pete’s touch, burning up, an exothermic reaction emitting heat and heat and heat.

He wishes — only semi-lucid — that Pete would kiss his blood-hot, fevered mouth.

“Good,” Pete murmurs. “Now, clothes…”

“’S’nothing wrong with my clothes,” Patrick slurs drunkenly. “Won’t fit yours anyway, so what’re you gonna do ’bout it?”

“They need to be brighter,” Pete murmurs soothingly, “tighter here,” he touches the top of Patrick’s arms, smooths his hands along his rib cage and suffuses him with something bright and silvered, “and pull it in a little here, some embellishment _there,”_ his hands dance along Patrick’s waist; his cock stirs involuntarily, “very nice. Now, close them up at the knees, a little tighter here, here and around the old family instrument… wow, good for you, little dude.”

Patrick feels deconstructed. Rearranged and sloppily put back together, his molecular structure realigned and threaded through with something golden that wasn’t there before. His skin hums, the fine hair on his arms prickled with sensation. Pete keeps stroking his skin, firm and deliberate, mapping him out like an intricate game of touch tag. Absently, he’s sort of embarrassed about the involuntary erection but he has so little control of his gross motor function that he’s not really taking responsibility for it.

“Hmm?” Patrick mumbles, insensible, leaning into the sensation of being caught at the center of a shooting star, all of his blood turned to vapor and ascending through the ceiling and up, up, up into the night sky beyond the roof. “W’assat?”

Pete steps back.

The air in the room is suffocating, choking, like breathing in glitter. It hurts the back of his throat. He coughs and chokes, falls to his knees and wonders if this is the moment that Pete actually fucking kills him. So much for the battle of the bands, he thinks, leaning against the rough, boy-smelling fabric of the couch, so much for a music career and a shot at international stardom. Still, he knows his name will feature in the newspaper at least once, even if he is being described as ‘the victim’.

“Breathe,” says Pete, like Patrick isn’t trying to do exactly that. “I know it’s weird, just give it a second and…”

It clears, Patrick fills his lungs with grateful gulps of clean air. “What did you do?” he moans. “I nearly _died_ and — wait,” Patrick sits up, punch drunk, “what happened?”

Patrick comes back to his own skin and finds it doesn’t fit in quite the same way as it did before. It’s like shrugging on last winter’s coat and finding the shoulders are a little tight. He wriggles back against it and flexes his toes down into his –

He pauses. Those are not his shoes.

This kickstarts a chemical reaction of thoughts – not his shoes, not his tight black pants, not his pyramid studded belt, not his electric blue Fugazi shirt – the fuzzing culmination of which is Patrick staggering to his feet and stumbling into the bathroom. When he looks in the mirror, someone else entirely blinks back at him.

“I—” he says, strangled, then bites it off when the stranger’s mouth moves at the same time as his. “What?”

His shaggy red mom-cut has gone. Instead, he has artfully mussed, platinum blond bangs, swept into his eyes like he wants them to be there. There’s a thick smudge of liner around his eyes, a neat silver hoop through the center of his lower lip. He looks not unlike the charmingly sexy ghost of Hot Topic past. He is more okay with this than he has any right to be. This is mostly because he is still unshakably convinced that none of this is actually happening.

“Pete,” he says slowly, and the ring clicks strangely against his teeth. He is no longer convinced that he is passed out cold on the floor of the basement. He’s willing to accept it has gone so much further than that and he’s actually dead and this is his punishment – to spend the rest of eternity tormented by the things that could have been but never will. “Am I dead? You can tell me, I’d — I think I’d be okay with it.”

“No. Why?”

Pete’s stupidly handsome face pops into the mirror beside him; Patrick screams and slaps at him wildly. There is a directory of questions at the tip of his tongue, including but not limited to ‘what the fuck, Pete, seriously, what the _fuck?’_ but all that comes out when he opens his mouth is, “You – I – How?”

“Magic,” says Pete, accompanied by spirit fingers. “Do you like it?”

He says it like it should be obvious. Like it’s no big deal that he has, with ten seconds of heavy facial petting, transformed Patrick from Marching Band Geek to Scene God Hottie. Patrick didn’t realize he even had the capacity to _be_ hot. It would’ve been nice if Pete could’ve made an appearance in high school when Patrick really could’ve used the boost. Most disconcerting of all is that Patrick, like Wendy, is rearranging everything he once thought he believed. With the evidence before him in the bathroom mirror, with his skin warm and his lip throbbing softly, Patrick _does_ believe in fairies.

With nowhere else to collapse, he slumps down onto the toilet seat. “Whoa,” he tells his purple converse, “that’s – you’re real. Faeries are real.”

“Was that up for debate?” Pete asks, and his thick, soft mouth is a hard, flat line, his heavy brows low as he scowls at the chipped linoleum. He asks again, more urgently this time: “So, _do_ you like it?”

There is no possible way for Patrick to explain that everything about him has felt wrong from the moment he was able to process a sense of his own disappointing, badly dressed, impossibly _sweaty_ self. He is sitting on the toilet seat of his tiny Roscoe apartment share wearing something that feels like a Halloween costume of the person he has the potential to be and it feels more real, more pulse-race glorious, than inhabiting the skin he was born into. He touches the tip of his tongue the ring through his lip, tastes the metallic tang of it and smiles.

“I’ve never felt less like me,” he says quietly. “I’ve never felt better.”

Pete’s smile is blinding, hot summer sunshine cracking the asphalt and burning Patrick’s skin. He kneels between Patrick’s legs and takes his face in both hands, assessing him, smiling for him. Their mouths are so close that Patrick can taste the herb garden sweetness of his breath. Softly, he whispers, “You were perfect before, this is just—"

There is a terrifying, hopeful possibility that Pete might be about to kiss him. Patrick closes his eyes.

“Uh, Pete…?” Someone calls from the living room. “You might want to get in here…”

Patrick freezes. There have been no voices in the apartment other than his for the past six months. This is less _lions and tigers and bears_ and more _killers and bailiffs and thieves._ It would be gloriously ironic if, instead of Pete murdering him, they were _both_ murdered by someone else entirely. So visceral is his terror, that he doesn’t notice the use of the name _Pete._ Between clenched teeth, he whispers, “Who the fuck is that?”

“Okay,” Pete says. “Don’t freak out, but I got you a band.”

“Oh, I’m freaking out,” Patrick assures him. “I left you alone in there for two minutes! Who _are_ they? They sound like wild animals!”

“Uh, so, _not quite_ , but—"

From the living room, there is a deafening crash, followed by a shriek that sounds a lot like someone being violently murdered. Patrick is performing turbo-charged mental arithmetic about the size of the bathroom window in relation to the circumference of his ass and the velocity of the fall to the sidewalk below. He would like, very much, not to become the next person to be violently murdered. Pete does not share his concerns and hurries from the room. “Come on, guys, what the hell are you doing?”

There’s another crash that sounds suspiciously like it might be the television. Faced with the option of making his dramatic escape or rescuing the audio-visual equipment, Patrick grabs his courage with both hands – along with a bottle of shampoo, for protection – and advances into the living room.

There is a kid, right around Patrick’s age, perched on the kitchen counter.

He’s dressed in ripped jeans and battered converse and a t-shirt that says ‘Sinister’, which is appropriate because that’s precisely what he _is_. He’s crouched on his heels, his blue eyes very wide and he is — and please don’t presume this is Patrick’s melodrama shining through —  actually _hissing_. This is, somehow, not the strangest thing to happen to Patrick so far today.

“Who the hell are you?” he asks the kid. “And why are you sitting on my kitchen counter?”

“Meow,” says the dude, emphatically and with such feeling that Patrick can’t help but feel he recognizes him from somewhere. _“Meeeow.”_

There are shards of Patrick’s meagre collection of dinnerware on the floor. He steps over them carefully and finds Pete propping up the TV with both hands and a smile that is somewhat manic around the edges. Behind him, an auburn-haired dude is attempting to talk down the kid who thinks he’s a cat from some kind of emotional crisis that is, presumably, centered around the belief that he is a fucking _cat_. “Hi,” says Pete, with forced cheerfulness, as though none of this is happening. “Everything is completely under control.”

It is immediately apparent, to Patrick at least, that this is untrue.

“Pete,” he says, with great restraint given the level of bullshit he is currently attempting to deal with. “What’s going on?”

With Herculean effort, Pete hauls the TV back into place. He points to the two strange men invading Patrick’s apartment and makes the statement Patrick knows is coming, but still hopes isn’t true. “Meet your band!”

Auburn waggles his fingers and nods briefly. “Hey,” he says. “Thanks for all the crackers, by the way, those things are _great.”_ Patrick has no idea what this means but he nods anyway.

Blue Eyes yawns dramatically and licks his lips. “Mrrp?”

“Pete,” Patrick says again. “That kid thinks he’s a cat.”

“Yes,” Pete nods sagely. “He does. Because until like, three minutes ago, he _was_ a cat. That’s Joe.”

“Meow,” Joe confirms agreeably, removing himself from the kitchen counter and curling into the corner of the couch instead. There is no sign of the feline Joe, but the human one appears to be attempting to purr, with limited success.

Patrick says, “Oh,” very faintly, and leans against the doorframe before he passes out. “Right.”

Pete rubs his temples and mutters, “I don’t understand, I’m sure I did the spell right…”

Again, there are probably a whole bunch of things Patrick should say at this point, people he should call, hospitals he should contact to check if they’re missing a handful of patients. This scene-haired lunatic has so far cost him his job (probably) and his mismatched collection of Goodwill crockery (definitely). Patrick’s easygoing affability at the whole… situation, is wearing perilously thin. But the living room window still doesn’t have curtains and, like a magic mirror, it shows the glorious reflection of the Patrick He Ought to Be. He turns slightly, admires himself and then catches sight of something above his belt.

“You gave me a tramp stamp?”

“A good artist always signs his work,” Pete shrugs. “But back to the cats…”

Patrick looks closer, “Of your _face?”_

“You’re getting distracted,” Pete accuses him, which is very unfair, because all of this is a _lot_ to take in and he now has Pete’s actual _face_ scarred into his skin. “Okay, so, that’s Joe, he’ll be your lead guitarist, this is Andy—”

“Also a cat,” Patrick says knowledgeably, like this sort of thing happens all the time. _“Of course_ he’s a cat, why wouldn’t he be a cat? Who needs Craigslist when you can turn cats into people?”

“—and Andy is your drummer,” Pete pauses, glares and shoves his hands into his pockets. He looks hurt and pissed off and Patrick feels, somewhere, a tiny festering knot of guilt. “You know, it’s pretty hard turning cats into reliable human musicians, you should try it sometime, see how it works out for you.”

Patrick watches another train thunder past the window and tries to recall if there was anything unusual about his day as he lay in his bed this morning. Any sense of grave foreshadowing that he was about to accosted by a faerie named Peter, that his cats would become human and he would, somehow, undergo a complete physical transformation in under thirty seconds. He comes up with nothing and shakes his head.

“I am very grateful for your help,” he says. “So, Andy, uh – thanks for always shitting in the litter tray and not shredding my pants. It’s – is it weird to say it’s nice to meet you?”

Patrick is having some difficulty keeping a straight face – he has seen more of Andy’s asshole over the past six months than he has seen of his own throughout the preceding eighteen years of his life.

“No problem,” says Andy with a shrug. “Thank _you_ for buying premium grade kitty litter!”

“Anytime – and Joe?”

“Mrrp?”

“I mean – thanks for only pissing on my bed that one time and, like, welcome to humanity and my band.”

“Mrrp,” says Joe.

Patrick assumes this is positive, but asks anyway, “Uh – Can he talk? Andy can — talk.”

“I don’t know, _Patrick_ ,” Pete replies with venomous sarcasm, “can _you_ make two talking cat people?”

“Uh…” Patrick shrugs, he is forced to admit that he can’t. “No, I – I guess not.”

There is something very old soul about Pete, the kind of thing that hides in the leylines between the tracks on the folk records his dad used to play. It stirs something glittered in Patrick’s blood, some bond that pulls them closer and makes him feel every burst of disappointment and rejection that hums over Pete’s skin. So determined is Patrick to be the best possible recipient of Pete’s enchantments over the years, that he doesn’t even complain that Andy is the drummer.

“Well,” he says instead, because this whole night is turning slightly Hunter S. Thompson and maybe, if he’s business-like about it, he won’t fall into a screaming cave of existential terror at the idea of wish-granting fae and cats who are very decidedly no longer cats. “I think we need to talk about the setlist. I had ideas about a Bowie showcase, ten songs, six minutes, but sort of… punked up, like, melodic hardcore meets Major Tom, so—”

“Ah,” says Pete. “About that…” That’s one of those sentences that nothing good can come from. Patrick raises his eyebrows. “There might be a thing. It’s a _tiny_ thing, nothing a pro like you can’t deal with. But, well, they can sort of only play the last thing they heard you sing.”

Patrick thinks about that and attempts to make it make sense. It does not. But neither do musical cat people or faeries so, just an idea, maybe he should stop trying to force any of this lucid fever dream to make sense. He says, “Oh,” and he looks at Joe who is staring at the back of his own hands like a hippy at Woodstock, “So… the magic that turns them from cats into functioning, human musicians is also the magic that only allows them to play the last song they heard me sing?”

“That’s right,” Pete nods. “If it helps, they can play it in like, any genre.”

“I see,” Patrick pauses. He does not want to sound ungrateful, but… “It’s just. Doesn’t that strike you as slightly weird?”

Pete looks perplexed. “How so?”

“Well, it’s… conveniently annoying. Like, if this was a book and I was analyzing it, I might be tempted to accuse the author of lazy writing to bridge together plot points, that’s all.”

“You know, you’re the first person to point that out.” Pete seems to give this great thought for a moment. Then he shrugs. “You’re right, it does sort of seem that way, doesn’t it?”

Patrick knows he should stop pushing his luck before Pete resorts to the kind of tactics that other bigger, stronger dudes have resorted to when Patrick gets mouthy, and begins flushing his head down the toilet. He clears his throat. “That’s — that’s _fine_. This is _fine._ Okay, so what was the last thing you guys heard me sing?”

Andy scratches the back of his head exactly how a cat would. “Something about Saturday? Does that — does that sound familiar?” He drums experimentally on his knees and yes, it’s the opening beat of something Patrick has been kicking around on GarageBand. Because he has no _actual_ band to play it. Worryingly, however, this means that the patrons of Angels & Kings are about to hear it whether they want to or not, whether it’s ready or not, whether Patrick throws up from stage fright or not.

“Yes,” he says weakly, and he fumbles for his hat.

Pete knocks it out of his hands. “If you cover your hair, so help me. That is a _masterpiece.”_

“Sorry.” He has forty-five minutes until his band will be called to the stage, until he can stand under the spotlight and attempt to succeed a crown amongst the royalty of the Chicago hardcore scene with a band made from cats and faerie magic. He claps his hands together, a dad in a Hard Rock Cafe. “I — _super_. Shall we, uh, rock and roll, kids?”

“Meow,” says Joe solemnly. He has, at least, stopped staring at his hands, although now he’s eyeing the cabinet where Patrick keeps the catnip.  

“One more thing,” Pete points vaguely in the direction of Patrick’s guitar case, “I — well, Joe sort of _dropped_ your guitar, so—”

That guitar is Patrick’s pride and joy, the Gretsch his dad gave to him with the crescent moon inlays. He would take a bullet for that guitar. If anything has happened to that guitar, Patrick will spend the rest of his evening calling animal shelters for vacancies. “He did _what?”_

“But I fixed it!” Pete continues brightly.

Patrick drops to his knees in front of the guitar case, fumbling with the clasps and tossing back the lid. He’s prepared for broken wood and snapped strings, for something Pete has pulled together with duct tape and enthusiasm but not skill. He’s greeted by the loveliest guitar he’s seen in his life; ice white with silver stripes, perfect in every unimaginable detail. It must be emitting its own light, humming softly with the choral satisfaction of a heavenly choir as he touches it with gentle fingertips.

“This is…” he trails off. There are no suitable words for a guitar like this. He settles on something wholly inadequate. “It’s beautiful.”

“I’ve been calling it the Stump-O-Matic,” Pete says casually, like he gives ethereal, custom-made guitars to every strange boy he goes home with. It’s reassuring to know that they’re both terrible at naming things. “But you can change the name if you want.”

Patrick is not worthy. He stays on his knees, running his hand in soft, reverent little motions along the neck, the headstock, tracing his thumb along the strings and feeling the ridge of the frets.

“I made one for Joe, too,” Pete says. “I mean, I attached a laser pointer to the pickup, so it should hold his attention on the stage…”

Oh, wait, that’s right. He’s about to perform live on stage, with no rehearsal, with two people he has never heard play. There is no possible way this can go wrong.

“Do we have time for a run-through?” he asks dubiously.

Pete shakes his head. “We do not. Oh, and by the way, you have until midnight, then everything goes back to the way it was. One night only, that’s the deal.”

So, Patrick decides in the center of his living room with two people who were cats only a handful of minutes ago, to roll with it. They will climb onto the stage in Angels and Kings and he will sing his heart out to tour with Gabe’s band because failing, he realizes, produces exactly the same outcome as not trying. Why not give it a whirl?

He nods and Pete leads and Andy follows and Patrick, carefully, steers Joe by the back of his belt down three flights of stairs and onto the cold Chicago sidewalk. His breath hangs cloudlike and his fingers are suddenly warm in the fingerless gloves and fleece-lined pockets of the hoodie he wasn’t wearing but now is. There’s a decal on the chest — the same as the ink between Pete’s hips — it’s curiously warm to the touch, a polaroid imprint of Pete’s enchanted skin.

“Do you have a car?” Pete asks. Patrick laughs. He doesn’t even own a bus pass. “Okay, fine. A bike, then? Scooter? Skateboard? Some kind of wheeled transportation?” Patrick continues to shake his head. “God, this would be so much easier if there was a convenient squash lying around… Alright, no, this is fine, this totally isn’t a problem, stand back.”

Pete stoops and stares and rummages amongst the dumpsters. Presumably, he’s looking for some kind of magic charm or ward, some piece of the city landscape he can transform into suitable transportation. Patrick is beginning to trust in magic.

Pete stands, a cracked house brick in his hand. There is nothing that stands out about this brick, it’s not an interesting brick, it’s the same as every other brick in most of the surrounding buildings but he beams at Patrick anyway. Something softens in Patrick’s insides and he asks, slightly stupidly, “Are you going to magic us up a van?”

“No,” Pete laughs, like this is very obvious and Patrick is very cute, “I’m going to steal one.”

And then he hefts the brick back over his shoulder and tosses it straight through the drivers window of the nearest minivan.

It happens in terrible high-def, slow-mo, an action sequence in a Michael Bay movie as the glass explodes from within the window frame. Patrick had no idea that car alarm systems could be so loud, it wails around them like an air raid siren, a ferocious _woo-woo-woo_ of earsplitting racket that’s going to summon every Chicago PD officer in a two-mile radius. He panics and wonders if it’s too late to run.

(Joe, is attempting to scale the fire escape ladder. He is, alternately, hissing and emitting a high shriek. He sounds — entirely — like a giant, man-sized cat. There is no way that this is going to make anything better when an inevitable swarm of patrol cars show up. It’s a very good thing that the only area Patrick can afford to live is _not_ in possession of a Neighborhood Watch committee.)

“Joe!” Patrick attempts to coax his catman down from the ladder. “Hey, shh, it’s fine, come on… Pete, get away from the fucking car!”

“Black wire, black wire, black wire,” Pete says from under the dash. “Feathers and ferns, why is _everything_ the same basic color…? Have you people thought about brightening things up a little?”

“Pete!” he bellows, the volume increasing alongside his desire to never find out what the inside of a prison cell looks like. “Pete, for fuck’s sake, what the fuck do you think you’re _doing!_ Joe, _please_ don’t climb up there, it doesn’t look safe. Or, like, _sanitary_ , and I have no idea if your shots are up to date! Andy, could you give me a—”

The van chirps twice — _beep-beep_ — and falls silent. Pete grins, charmingly labradorish. “Fixed it.”

Patrick looks at the broken glass, at the glitter of it splintered in the gutter and the crater of a dent in the paintwork. “That,” he says, “is clearly _not_ true. Like, _at all._ That’s not our van to take!”

“We’re just _borrowing_ it,” Pete insists.

“You don’t have a key! Or — you know — _insurance!”_

“Bippity, boppity, _vroom,”_ says Pete and the van roars to life. “See?”

“If you can do that to the engine, why didn’t you just unlock the door?!”

“You’re putting unnecessary pressure on me! I don’t respond well to stress!”

“Pete,” says Patrick levelly, because it’s important that Pete understands just how serious he is being, “we are _not_ stealing a van. This is someone’s car! Look, there’s — there are soccer balls in the back!”

In the distance, Patrick thinks he hears a siren. Pete begins to pale. “Dude, please, just get in the van, I’ll — I can _fix_ it before we bring it back! This is — it’s a loaner, that’s all…”

“Guys, can we present a united front on this, because—”

“Hi,” says Andy, from the passenger seat. Patrick has no idea how he slipped past him on the sidewalk. “I think — this is called shotgun, right?”

“Mrrp?” says Joe, from the back. It’s true what they say about cats and loyalty.

Patrick sighs very deeply and then, without saying a word, he climbs in beside Joe. They are travelling across the city in a stolen 1992 Toyota Previa. Just Patrick, the world’s most impulsive (but impossibly _handsome)_ Faerie Godperson and two Artists Previously Known as Mittens. He clips on his seatbelt and does a very good job of not looking happy about any of this.

“Cheer up,” says Pete, his copper eyes luminous in the streetlights, “Look! You have fold down tables!”

That will be scant comfort from the cell of a federal institution.

***

They get to the venue and it’s already rocking, kids spilling out onto the front steps and piling deep into the entrance lobby. It’s not until they’re standing at the sign in desk, filling in the blank spot between Urie-ka! and A Way and A Way that Patrick is struck by a very pressing issue.

“Pete,” he whispers, taking their laminated passes and clipping one onto his belt. “Pete, listen.”

“Hmm?” says Pete.

“We can’t do this,” Patrick hisses. “I don’t — I’ve literally _never played_  that song in front of anyone. It’s not even a song yet, not really, it’s just me fucking around on my laptop.”

Pete looks up and down the sign-in queue with exaggerated patience. “Now is not the time, Rickster.”

There’s bile at the back of Patrick’s throat and he’s remembering, in sharp and vivid detail, all of the reasons that he’s never really performed before without a drum kit to hide behind. Running seems like a good option, even in the impossibly tight pants and the shoes he hasn’t bothered to lace up properly, or Pete didn’t when he manifested them onto Patrick’s feet. His mom’s voice echoes in the back of his head about proper ankle support. This is probably his brain attempting to talk him down from the window ledge of blind panic.

“Can’t,” he shakes his head very carefully, already spinning with vertigo, his fingers sweat-slippery against the handle of his guitar case. “I can’t do this.”

Pete looks at him speculatively, like he’s weighing up the probability of Patrick blowing chunks or bolting. He clearly decides the risk is high as he wraps his hand around Patrick’s bicep and steers him out of the line. “Come with me.”

They leave Andy guarding the guitars with feline ferocity and Joe staring at a light on the wall, patting at it with his hands and jerking them into his chest. He explodes with confused rage every time he opens them to reveal nothing at all. Patrick is beginning to have serious doubts about the validity of Pete’s claims that Joe is capable of playing a guitar. He’s beginning to doubt that Joe is capable of being left unaccompanied for five minutes at a stretch. There is a reason, he thinks, that the term for something impossible is ‘herding cats’.

Pete finds an alcove set into the wall, dark and shadowed and safe. “Okay,” he says firmly, when it becomes apparent that Patrick is only going to open his mouth to provide an escape route for his lunch. “I need you to know that both you and the song are amazing and that you’re totally going to kill it when you get up there.”

“There’s literally, like, no possible way that you can know that,” Patrick argues, because he’s terrified and arguing seems preferable to collapsing. “You’ve never heard the song, you’ve never heard me, and you’ve never heard _them,”_ he jerks a thumb in the direction of Joe and Andy, “so just... jot that down.”

“Patrick,” Pete says, imbued with significance, “I am your Faerie Godperson. My one job — the only thing I was ever taught how to do — is make wishes come true. Your wishes know your _soul_ , man, they know you better than you know them. And my heart speaks to those wishes. It’s like — it’s like another language, and even if we don’t understand it, the magic and the wishes _do.”_

“What do you mean, you know my wishes?” Patrick has wished for many things over the course of his life. Including several things he would rather not share with the group.

“Music,” Pete says simply, shrugging his shoulders. “You’ve wished for music every day since you arrived in the city. This is what you _want_. There is no way that you can step onto that stage and be anything other than amazing.”

Patrick thinks about this, and then he barks out abruptly, “I don’t want to win if it’s you, like, _compelling_ them to let me! I want to — I want to win because I deserve it! I mean, mostly I want to go home and never think about this again, but — I don’t want to _cheat.”_

“Patrick,” Pete says and he looks at him like he’s particularly dense. “How could _anyone_ look at you, listen to you, _be in the same room as you_ and not want to see more of you?”

Honestly, Patrick has a lengthy list of people who have looked at, listened to and spent time in the same room as him and shown no compunction whatsoever to repeat the experience on a regular, or even semi-regular, basis. He shakes his head and makes wild, panicked gestures with his hands, hoping to convey to Pete, via the medium of interpretive dance, how absolutely and emphatically _wrong_ he is about this.

“But,” he squeaks, shaking his head and backing further into the corner. “We don’t have a bassist.”

Pete pauses, but only for a moment. Then, he says, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll — you can play bass?” Patrick asks suspiciously. The suspicion is a nice distraction, actually. It’s really drawing his attention from the nauseating need to vomit on Pete’s shoes. _“You?”_

Pete shakes his head, his hair fluttering into his eyes as he grins mischievously. He looks impish, impossibly fae-like as he leans in close, his breath warm with the scent of rosemary, and touches Patrick’s shoulder. “I haven’t touched a string instrument since the Faust premiere in 1829,” he says confidently. “Now _that_ was one hell of a party. And I _definitely_ haven’t played one of those new-fangled electric monstrosities.”

Pete reaches into a fold of the velvet curtain that trims their alcove retreat and extracts the most basic Squier bass that Patrick has ever laid eyes on. It’s black, the same stamp that adorns Patrick’s hoodie and Pete’s groin emblazoned on the body in blood red. Pete slings the strap over his shoulder and plucks a few out of tune notes.

“Oh,” Patrick thinks about this for a moment. “So you’ll… use magic to learn how to play?”

Pete grins. “Of course not. Where would be the fun in that?”

***

They follow Urie-Ka! which is less of a blessing and more of a curse as, it turns out, the kid fronting the band can turn backflips. Patrick can’t turn backflips. He might — _might_ — be able to execute a relatively decent forward roll if he tries really hard and they clear a big enough space on stage. He doesn’t think it’ll look impressive.

The spotlight is hot and Patrick is sweating unattractively. When he glances down, he realizes that he looks like he is lactating, two large, dark patches over his chest. The mic hisses with feedback as he stares at the crowd with growing horror. His vocal cords have frozen, he can’t speak or sing or even think clearly. Beside him, Joe discovers the laser pointer and darts forward. They don’t have a band name, he just scrawled his own name across the sheet at the desk, he feels incredibly stupid as he licks his lips and croaks, “Uh…”

“What the fuck is up, Chicago!” Pete roars, leaning over Patrick’s shoulder to scream into his mic. “We’re Fall Out Boy and we are not like any other band you’ve heard before.”

 _They have no idea how right he is_ , Patrick thinks as Andy clicks them in, as his sweaty fingers find their place on the frets and Joe explodes into sound beside him. _And who the fuck are Fall Out Boy?_

“I’m good to go, and I’m going nowhere fast, could be worse I could be taking you there with me…”

Once they begin, he forgets how to do anything but stand on this stage and sing this song.

Patrick plays like he’s liquid. The song flows through him, into his hands and his fingers and deep into the golden core of his vocal cords. He sings with words that Pete places into his mouth, onto his tongue, that tingle through the roots of his teeth and power down the microphone. The crowd is insane for them, pulsing on a platinum thread of current that runs directly from PeteandPatrick’s song and through the collective vascular system of five-hundred hardcore kids, carried on arteries of battered Etnies and Walgreens own-brand eyeliner.

Joe spins, chasing the end of his cable as he shreds through the guitar like it offends him. Andy thrashes at the drums, an feral blur of arms and hair and the sharp, feline corners of his grin. This is everything that Patrick imagined it could be, even as Pete punishes the bass and works the crowd. They work right back. They are in love with the song, in love with the way Patrick’s throat conducts them like a spell, in love with Pete. This is the single greatest moment of his life. He is gold.

There’s a magnetic hum between the two of them, Patrick can feel it, his polarity centered on the devilish spin of Pete’s body around the stage. He moves with abstract precision, like each step is an accident but entirely calculated, like the two of them are stepping a waltz around one another. Patrick closes his eyes and opens his mouth and lets the music pour from him; his tongue and hands and fingers casting spells entirely of their own.

Pete curls around him, his forehead pressed to the hot, sweaty curve of Patrick’s throat. It’s unexpected but not unwelcome. Instead, it feels like coming home, the slide of a key into a lock that’s rusted and unused but still fits. Dark bangs tickle the underside of Patrick’s jaw, the press of Pete’s bass solid against his hip. Then, Pete leans closer, moves his blood-hot mouth against Patrick’s throat and whispers in his ear, “You are fucking _magical_ , Rickster.”

Patrick implodes from the inside out. He detonates down to the most basic atoms and molecules that make up his body and his music. Patrick possibly fucking _dies_ with Pete mouthing against the throb of his heartbeat, kissing it deep in his throat. He realizes it, in that cut crystal moment when his skin feels sharp and hot, like broken glass, that there’s something far more enchanting about Pete than his day job. They’re twinned, the two of them, fated and destined and written in the stars above Chicago. This cannot possibly be one night only.

They’re Fall Out Boy.

“Me and Pete,” he adlibs, singing until his throat hums, his white-blond bangs stuck to his face and sweating stinging his eyes, “in the wake of Saturday.”

And the next Saturday, and the one after that, and every Saturday from now until the world dims. He rolls his wet forehead against the crown of Pete’s head and tries not to wince as Pete hits a bum note. Okay, maybe some things could do with some work.

They share a microphone as Pete begins to scream alongside him, stirring the visceral clench of Patrick’s guts as the song absorbs Pete’s fury. Their sweat mingles on the shoulder of Patrick’s shirt and it must be magic dripping from Pete, something caught in the salt of it that makes the room glitter like christmas at the edges. It’s not Patrick’s haircut, not the Hot Topic shirt or the impossibly beautiful guitar in his hands. It’s _them_ , this band, this moment, this wonderful, guts-raw song that they’re pouring over the crowd.

The song closes to rapture, the crowd sliding over one another, slipping over the edge of the stage and crowding them, shoving them, touching them. Pete presses to Patrick’s left flank, robing him in heat as the kids reach out to touch the edges of their clothing, their hands, seeking benediction from ordained ministers of music. Joe crowds to Patrick’s right, smiling like the proverbial (and literal) cat with the cream. When he touches his sweaty, bleach-stained forehead to Patrick’s pulse, he swears he can hear him purr. In his chest, Patrick hums with contentment so rich and deep it settles into his marrow, rearranges him and leaves him threaded through with sparkling veins of hot satisfaction.

This is how it’s supposed to be, he thinks, this is _always_ how it’s supposed to be. _Me and Pete._

Security herds them off the stage, because security likes to kill everyone’s buzz like that and they crowd through the rooms cleared out backstage for performers. Guitars shrugged off they hug and holler — Pete and Andy and Patrick — and purr and chirp — Joe — and there is _no way_ that Patrick can’t do this again. There’s no possible universe in which this feels quite so right with any other collection of people (and cats).

“That was amazing,” he says to Pete, softly, into the copper hollow of his throat where Patrick can taste his pulse. “We were amazing. You were — you’re a horrible bassist, not gonna lie, but you held them like you’re…”

He trails off awkwardly as Pete pulls back, a sad smile haunting the corners of his lips. “Like I’m magical,” Pete says. “Like I had them under my thrall, right? Because I did, because it meant they couldn’t see that I sucked. They love me because I compel them to love me. But I didn’t need to make anyone love _you_ , Patrick, that was — you’re solid gold, all the way through.”

Before Patrick can object, he’s swept away by someone tall and lean and dressed in more neon and clashing color than Pete, a feat that leaves Patrick faintly impressed. “I’m Gabe Saporta, Midtown,” the stranger introduces himself, and once again, Patrick wants to throw up. “You guys were fucking incredible out there!”

“Uh, thanks,” Patrick says awkwardly. He would love to stay and bask in Gabe’s praise for a moment or two, but it belongs to his band, too, and his skin is humming with the need to be near Pete. “I — sorry we trashed your stage.”

He looks back at Pete because he needs to catch his eye, to make it perfectly clear that nothing about the liquid mercury sensation boiling through Patrick’s veins right now is an enchantment. The words sting his tongue, a mouthful of 90s Hugh Grant stuttering that he needs to share with the world about love at first sight and staying this way forever, frozen in their own private fairytale.

It’s too late. Pete is already leaving.

“... might even switch things around, make you our vocalist,” Gabe is saying and ordinarily, Patrick’s heart would sing and his guts would cramp and he’d assume this was all some kind of wonderful dream. Gabe is beaming at him, touching him, sliding his hands along Patrick’s arms and staring at his mouth like he’s hungry for it.

Patrick smiles politely, then he shoves away impolitely and says, “That’s amazing. Thanks. But I’ve really got to…”

He takes off in the same direction as Pete. There’s something he needs to say.

***

He catches up with Pete in the alleyway out back of the venue, halfway between the fire escape and the dumpsters for the Lebanese place next door. The whole area smells of secondhand smoke and rancid baba ganoush. Patrick can think of better places in which to conduct a heart to heart.

“Hey,” he says and it’s like Pete didn’t notice the door banging open, or Patrick’s footsteps on the asphalt because he jumps at the sound of his voice and winds his arms a little more tightly around his midsection. “Come inside. Please, Pete — I need to talk to you.”

Pete winces back against the wall like he’s in pain, his lips twisting into a grimace and his fingers curling into fists. “I just need a minute,” he says, when it’s clear he needs several. “I — the magic is — it’s getting close to midnight, man, you should get inside, take names, mingle.”

Patrick’s never been in… to anyone before, he has no frame of reference for the feeling in the deep, hidden core of his guts, the way his lungs spasm every time Pete looks at him. He is, very deliberately, _not_ thinking in four letter words. That’s insane, it makes him feel off-balance, like he’s playing a game but no one has taken the time to tell him the rules, where he should stand, how he should move. There’s no way he’s caught deep and enduring feelings for someone he’s known for two hours. He’s eighteen years old and just rolling off his first stage high, it’s probably completely normal to feel warm, stiff-under-the-pants emotion towards the mythical being who made it happen.

Especially when that being looks like Pete.

So, Patrick collapses onto the curb at Pete’s feet and rubs his cheek against the heat of Pete’s thigh through his jeans. It feels like something Joe might do — the feline manifestation or the current, species-confused version — some primal expression of affection accompanied by the curl of Patrick’s bicep around the back of Pete’s calf. But Pete makes this _sound_ , strangled and desperate in the back of his throat, as he slides down the brickwork behind them and stares at Patrick with wide, hungry, frightened eyes.

“You’re _doing_ something to me, Patrick,” Pete whispers, his voice not unlike the sharp snap of twigs underfoot on dark forest paths, the kind of sharp sound that prickles the hair at the nape of Patrick’s neck, that makes him want to walk faster, keep his head down, not look back in case something terrifying is right behind him. “You’re — I can’t even put it into words but no one — they didn’t _warn_ me.”

“What?” Patrick can feel his brow furrow, his mouth pull. “Who didn’t? About what?”

“Patrick,” Pete says again, tumbling half on Patrick’s lap where the dumpster doesn’t smell so bad and the thick, white light of the security lamp isn’t quite so piercing. He says it like it soothes him, like the shape of Patrick’s name in his mouth eases some primitive ache. He keeps saying it, pushing his palms against the planes of Patrick’s pectorals, his ribs, under the Fugazi shirt and tracing his fingertips along the band of Patrick’s boxers. “Patrick. Patrick. Patrickpatrick _patrick.”_

This is escalating quickly, but Patrick is eighteen and this stupidly pretty man is touching him, touching him, _touching him._ The world narrows, a single circuit loop that runs from Pete’s fingertips and spirits through the full, sparking length of Patrick’s nervous system. He is electric, the hum of a reverberating fretboard, as Pete palms at him, strokes him, rubs over the improbable, impossible hardness under his zipper but — agonizingly — doesn’t _kiss him._

“Please,” he begs, unsure what for, and Pete rears back, his eyes liquid and dark like ink, like his tattoos. “I want to…”

The neck of Pete’s shirt is pulled slack, that barbed wire invitation still scrawled around his throat. Patrick moves, drawn in, his lips unthinking as they smear against the throbbing hum of Pete’s pulse in his throat. Patrick kisses that heartbeat, tastes it under his teeth, his wet tongue, nipping into the flavor of Pete’s muscle and sinew and skin. There’s some foreign sweetness lingering there, powdered sugar and cinnamon; Patrick is starving for it. Wants to know if that sugariness drips down him like an IHOP syrup bottle, if he tastes the same at the points of his hip bones, the musky ditch of his groin, the fierce thrust of his dick, if he has one.

Pete groans, head thrown back and hand still rubbing, his thumb carving heat under the thick, swollen head of Patrick’s engorged cock. The sensation is ecstatic, Patrick arches uselessly, thrusts up his hips and makes a broken, ragged sound. Pete is straddling Patrick’s thigh like he can ride him somewhere safer, rubbing off, thrusting down, the solid heat of his cock answering a question Patrick didn’t know he wanted to ask until twenty seconds ago: _Okay, so faeries_ do _have dicks._

Still humming Patrick’s name like a prayer or a spell or a curse, Pete gets a hand on Patrick’s ridiculous pyramid belt, yanks at the buckle until it surrenders, tugging it through his belt loops and dropping it to the floor. He sighs against Patrick’s throat and slips under the zipper, under the close-fitting shape of his designer-brand-name-on-the-waistband boxer briefs and through the salted crisp of his pubic hair. Between his legs, Patrick’s dick twitches victoriously, his hips canting up as he breathes _fuck me, fuck me, fuck me_ , Pete’s fingers so close that the heat kicking off them is agonizing. This is the wildest thing he’s ever done, the thick, sweet musk of Pete’s skin bursting like ripe berries on his tongue.

Pete nudges his forehead against Patrick’s, knocking his head down into the concrete, tipping up his mouth and allowing him to claim the wet, dirty heat of Patrick’s lips, tongue, teeth with his own. Patrick kisses with his eyes open because this is something he wants to remember in all of its fluorescent, boldly brilliant glory. Pete’s tongue works past his lips, licks into his mouth and swipes against his own like he’s been poisoned and the antidote is underneath, like he’s checking Patrick’s teeth for cavities, like Patrick’s lungs hold the last breath of air and Pete is suffocating. He kisses desperate and takes no prisoners and knots his free hand into the platinum brilliance of Patrick’s hair. He pins him close and bites his lip and Patrick wonders if it’s possible for every synapse he possesses to shut down simultaneously, if he can _die_ from being kissed.

Then, Pete’s fingers curl around the root of Patrick’s swollen dick. He strokes him carefully, mapping out the curve and thickness, shaping him like clay. The pad of his thumb brushes under the head in slow, golden motion and this must be, can’t be anything _but_ , a glorious, heavenly dream. Teeth seize his lip, pull with exquisite sharpness. Patrick hooks one thigh over Pete’s hip and spreads his legs. He opens for him, cracks himself wide and, woozy on the half-drunk redirection of blood to his groin, he crashes his mouth back to Pete’s.

“You are _so,”_ Pete says, but doesn’t finish; his hand strokes, pulls, rubs at Patrick’s cock. The fire escape is right behind them, if anyone comes looking for them, if anyone steps outside for air or a cigarette, they’ll crack Patrick’s skull with the heavy metal door. He doesn’t care.

“I’m gonna,” he gasps, his orgasm chasing him, rather than the other way around. He _wants_ to come, wants to paint the musky confines of his boxers with heat, slick on Pete’s palm. He _doesn’t_ _want_ to come because then it’ll be over, then it’ll be midnight.

Then he’ll just be Patrick.

Then this glorious mistake of fate and circumstance will be over and Pete will be gone and Fall Out Boy will never have existed.

Patrick sinks his fingernails into Pete’s shoulders, imagines scarring him up with deep, crimson crescents, bruising him with the points of his fingertips. He kisses him, all incautious, needy tongue, wet and messy, biting into the lush pink of Pete’s lip until it’s red, swollen, damp. Until it’s like Patrick’s aching cock in Pete’s warm fist. He kisses and thrusts and commits every moment to memory, internally cataloging polaroids of each hungry shove and push and pull.

He holds his breath and starts to come.

He comes like he’s been gutted, like the insides of him are scraped out and there’s nothing but hollow heat and red, rich emptiness left behind. He comes in powerful, pulsing throbs that coat Pete’s hand, that paint the skin exposed by rucked up shirts and low-riding jeans. He comes and _tastes_ it, salty and iron tinged, like the ocean and old nails and something glittering sweet on the tip of his tongue. He comes and the universe narrows to the copper brilliance of Pete’s eyes, to the visible sensation of hot, liquid gold marbled with vibrant, violent red.

“You are _so,”_ says Pete again, and nothing more, _again_ , because Pete locks up, groans hollowly and tenses over and above Patrick. He thrusts against his thigh, hard and fast like friction burn. Yes to that, Patrick will cherish each fingernail bruise and patch of raw, chafed skin. He rubs back, slides his weak, liquid thigh against the hardness at Pete’s groin.

“Yes,” Patrick whispers. “I love you.”

Pete is even more beautiful when he comes.

***

They win, which probably ought to feel more significant than it does. It’s difficult to feel elated when tomorrow there will be no Fall Out Boy to go on tour, when it’ll just be Patrick and a couple of house cats and the music won’t matter. His underwear is sticking to him which makes him simultaneously grouchy and elated.

He spends the drive home wondering how, exactly, he’s supposed to say goodbye to his Faerie Godperson. There was no rule book, no conveniently cited guide on How Not to Fall in Love. Pete touches the back of his hand as the van rolls through the city and under the streetlights. They arrive back at the apartment building ten minutes before midnight.

“I don’t want to go to sleep,” he says as Pete herds him into his bedroom, as they collapse, the four of them, sweaty on the sheets.

“You do,” Pete insists. “It’s… better. If you just wake up and everything is back to how it was.”

“That was amazing,” says Andy dreamily. The closer they drift to midnight, the more cat-like he looks. Patrick reaches out and touches his hair softly; it feels like fur. “The best night of my life. Even better than the night you left the cabinet door open and we got in at the catnip.”

“Mrrp,” Joe chirps agreeably, snuggling into Patrick’s side.

“So, like, come morning,” Patrick begins, then stops. He doesn’t want the morning.

“Come morning, you’ll still have won the battle of the bands,” Pete says quietly, his eyes on the door. If he wants to run away, he could at least pretend he doesn’t for a few more minutes. “This — I don’t know how — I wanted to make you happy.”

Eyes closing, Patrick smiles sadly. “You did,” he whispers, drifting off like he’s been drugged. “You — God, you really did.”

He sleeps.

***

When Patrick wakes, he feels defective in his hand me down comforter and Simpsons boxer shorts. Last night, three people stretched out on the mattress around him but now he’s alone save for the soft, warm pebbles of two sleeping cats. There is no sign of Pete, which makes sense because he’s thinking about a _faerie_. There’s every possibility that Patrick contracted strep from Will and spent the past twelve hours in a lucid fever dream. He touches his brow and finds it cool, dry, his lips and throat raw with the intensity of overuse.

He sits up slowly, knocking Joe onto his back and exposing the rich, dark fur of his belly. He ruffles it absently and Joe chirps, blinking up at him. “You were — absolutely amazing last night,” Patrick tells him, which sounds creepy in this gruff, throaty sex voice he didn’t know he had. “I mean, as a guitarist, not a — you know what I mean.”

Andy purrs and stretches and bumps under Patrick’s chin. “You too, Andy, best kitty drummer I ever met. I’m going to buy you all the premium litter you can shit on.” His eyes sting; he misses their voices already. Well, Andy’s voice. Joe sounds much the same. “You can be my beat man anytime.”

Andy, unsurprisingly, doesn’t get the Top Gun reference. In the mirror over his dresser, Patrick can see his coppery blond mom cut standing on end, his grungy Guys Gone Wild shirt sticking to him with last night’s sweat and his sideburns back in place. He thinks he slept in his pants — _his_ pants, battered and ripped — there is no sign of a lip ring clicking against his teeth.

Distressingly, this means that Patrick imagined the whole thing. Which is obvious, really, because in the gray light filtering through his half-broken roller blind, Patrick no longer believes in faeries. He doesn’t. _He doesn’t._ No matter how much he wants to, no matter how good he imagined it felt on the stage with the crowd noise humming through his vascular system. Magic isn’t real. Which means, by extension, that Pete, that Joe and Andy as anything but housecats, that _Fall Out Boy_ , isn’t real.

“God,” he mutters at his alarm clock. “That was the most fucked up dream I’ve ever had, I need to — I need _friends!”_

“Ngh,” says the pile of blankets next to Patrick in the bed.

“Fuck!” screams Patrick, throwing a couple of punches at the lump beneath the sheets. “What the fuck!”

The blankets grunt and wriggle and Patrick is two seconds away from beating them to death with his bedside lamp because this is not the way that bed sheets should behave. The cats have scattered, so it’s nice to know they’ve got his back when he needs them. It’s now just Patrick, one on one against whatever the fuck is crawling around inside his bed. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt fear like this before in his _life_ , it’s all consuming, his flight or fight response frozen as he squeaks obscenities like they can keep him safe.

From beneath the sheets, a shock of dark hair appears. “Dude,” Pete grumbles, “is this the way you greet every guy who wakes up in your bed? If you’re looking for a reason that you’re still single, I think I figured it out…”

Patrick reminds himself to breathe normally as his heart jackrabbits interesting patterns within his chest. There’s a couple of thoughts blowing around the panic-bleak prairie of his cortical matter right now, sentences that start with _what_ and _why_ and _how_ , but everything feels like its misfiring and so, when he opens his mouth, all that falls out eloquently onto the sheets between them is, “I have _never_ brought a strange man home in my _life.”_

Which is patently untrue to everyone in the room because here is Pete, quite the strangest man Patrick has ever met, in his home. In his _bed._ Judging by the acres of lean, inked skin on display between Pete’s thorned throat and smooth, flat groin, he may actually be entirely naked. If Patrick didn’t experience some kind of out of body, Fight Club dreamstate the night before, then the memory of Pete kissing him breathless as he stroked his dick probably happened, too. His cheeks heat; that was a different Patrick entirely. Why then, can this lesser version still feel the pressure of Pete’s thigh against his groin?

It’s not that he doesn’t want to remember the melting openness of Pete’s slick, hot mouth against his, the rich earth smell of his cock on Patrick’s hand. God, he does. He _really_ does. It’s just he doesn’t want to remember it when Pete is lounging against his pillows, all louche and sexy, a scientific blueprint of debauchery laid out on a craigslist mattress. There are things he’d like to _do_ while he remembers it. Private things. Patrick clears his throat pathetically. “I mean, maybe I’ve brought _some_ people home. I’m not like, a loser.”

Pete grins. It’s a very nice grin, sharp, toothy canines that dig into his lower lip.

“Last night was incredible,” he says. It’s unclear if he means the company, the band, the ear-humming roar of the crowd or Patrick’s inept, clumsy mouth biting kisses to his lips, his throat, tasting the ink along his collar bone.

(Uncomfortable truth: there is no _way_ he means that last one.)

He’s not desperate enough to ask. Instead, he draws patterns on the comforter between them with the tip of his finger. It’s easier to do all sorts of things when he’s not longer looking directly into Pete’s stupidly gorgeous face, his old-amber eyes of an ancient being. Things like talking, things like _breathing_. He mutters at a loose thread, “Yeah. It was — it was the best night of my life.”

That probably covers all of the bases. He concentrates so fiercely on not noticing Pete’s pierced nipple that he gives himself a headache. In the cold light of day, he’s unsure that what he did last night is even legal. Is Pete human? Are there laws against coming on the (distractingly lean, misleadingly _strong)_ line of his faerie godperson’s stomach? Does he require legal counsel and how the hell is he going to explain it to his mom if he does?

“Patrick?” says Pete quietly.

He elects not to look up from the comforter, from his pale fingertip, committed to avoiding Pete’s eyes.

“Hmm?”

“Do you — Okay, weird question, but do you remember everything that happened last night?”

Patrick pauses and then he lies smoothly. “You gave me a band, you gave me a song, you gave me everything I ever wanted,” that’s true, but it’s vague enough that he doesn’t have to feel embarrassed about it, “and I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

“Right,” Pete says, soft and disappointed. “I — yeah. That’s — you’re welcome.”

The ‘I love you’ that Patrick murmured to a _stranger_ on the filthy floor of an alleyway just off Fullerton is not up for debate.

“Anyway, should you still be here?” Patrick asks, a quick grope under the sheets reassuring him that he is still dressed. “Not that I want you to leave but like, you said it was a one night only deal.”

The frown in Pete’s voice is audible. “Actually, yeah, that’s a pretty good question. I don’t honestly know why I’m still here. Once the good deed is done, I go home to the court, you go on with your life and that’s it. It’s supposed to be very Sixteen Candles. One night changes it all, you know?”

“You have John Hughes movies in faerie court?”

“The Brat Pack transcends magical borders, Patrick. Not many things manage that. We basically have Molly Ringwald, the alt/rock department of Borders and Starbucks.”

“Starbucks?”

“Don’t look surprised, nowhere is safe from Starbucks.”

It’s unclear if Pete is teasing him, he smiles so frequently, so disarmingly. Patrick shakes his head and rolls to his feet. “So, if the show wasn’t enough, what are you supposed to do for me? Teach me how to run the washer dryer? Tutor me at math?”

“I don’t know,” Pete says slowly. “But you weren’t satisfied with what happened last night. I didn’t rock your world, which is sort of my whole purpose. So, we need to figure out what it is that you actually _want.”_

What Patrick wants is currently laid in his bed scratching idly at his armpit. The laws of social anxiety dictate that he can’t just _say_ that, though. Besides which, there is no reason at all to suggest that Pete feels the same. There’s a strong case for making like Bob Dylan or the dude from Love Actually and converting his feelings into flash cards.  He’d like to talk this over with a close friend but he doesn’t actually _have_ any of those unless anyone’s counting Will who is both a colleague and incapacitated. Talking to the cats seems counterproductive now they’re just cats. He sighs and grinds his knuckles into his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he lies badly, his face very hot, “I just know that when I was up on stage with you last night, everything felt right and now — now it doesn’t.”

Pete gives this some thought and nods slowly, “Is this about the, uh, well — what happened after the show? Did I — I mean, you seemed into it, so—”

“No!” Patrick barks, because he doesn’t want to hear that he was nothing more than a pity fuck. He’s currently less corporeal being and more raging emotional dumpster fire and the last thing he needs is another jet of gasoline. “It was fine! Look, I need to…”

“I heard what you said,” Pete continues, because apparently he has no such concerns for the stability of Patrick’s mental function. “I — thought, maybe—”

“Please stop,” Patrick begs, “I — I swear to God, I’m not talking to you until you’re wearing pants.”

Pete huffs quietly. “Spoilsport.”

He reaches for his laptop and navigates to MySpace.

They both fall silent as the screen glows and hums and fills the room with the sound of his voice. When the video catches up with the audio, there they are, the two of them wound around one another, thorns through a crumbling wall, as their song ricochets through the speakers. _Me and Pete._ Patrick gasps. He has never looked at someone, at _anything_ the way he is looking at Pete on the screen. He clears his throat awkwardly.

“Wow,” Pete mutters, crowding into Patrick’s personal space and leaning his chin on his thigh.

“Well,” Patrick says briskly, knocking him off. “I’m sure they put up footage of _all_ the bands, that doesn’t mean…”

The show footage cuts, it’s the lobby of the club now, someone talking earnestly at the camera.

“I need to find this guy, this _voice,”_ Gabe Saporta implores from the screen. There is something that looks suspiciously like Patrick’s pyramid belt clutched in his hand which is awkward, because this means he has to think about _why_ it was removed from his pants. Between his legs, his cock gives an inappropriate twitch and he shoves Pete back an inch or two further. “If anyone recognizes him, or recognizes this belt — I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this logo on the buckle,” Patrick’s eyes slide involuntarily to Pete’s groin, as do Pete’s, they both blush and look very deliberately back at the screen, “Please, Patrick, wherever you are, you need to get in touch.”

“Oh,” says Patrick faintly, gritty with embarrassment. His skin feels like it’s on fire, like he might immolate at any moment and leave nothing behind but the twisted remains of his glasses and half of his left leg. “They — He probably _didn’t_ do that for all the bands.”

Pete struggles upright and pours himself into the protective bubble Patrick is trying _so hard_ to maintain between them. A rather _large_ issue is that, with the sheet pushed to one side, it becomes apparent that Pete does not wear underwear to bed. He climbs into Patrick’s lap and grabs him by the sideburns and shakes him aggressively, like a terrier. Patrick is definitely _not thinking_ about Pete’s naked penis crushed up against his zipper.

“I have the best idea!” he declares and Patrick knows that can’t possibly be true, because he’s known Pete for less than twenty-four hours but already he knows that nothing Pete can say at ten in the morning, in the center of Patrick’s pre-owned bed, can be anything close to a good idea. Any moment now he’s going to bring up what Patrick whispered in the alleyway once more, and Patrick is going to have to come up with an insanely plausible excuse or throw himself from the bedroom window. “You’re gonna love it!”

“Honestly, none of this is necessary,” Patrick insists. “If you just wanted to put on some pants and… do whatever faeries do on Saturday mornings that doesn’t involve my apartment—”

Pete continues like Patrick hasn’t even opened his mouth. “I’m gonna give you Gabe!” He rushes on before Patrick can say anything. “I mean, it used to be a prince, sure, but why can’t it be a musician? You think in stanzas, not sentences, you’re, like, eighty-percent music theory and twenty-percent vinyl elitism, _of course_ that’s what you want!”

“Hey!” Patrick objects. Somehow, when Pete says it out loud, the music thing sounds _weird._ “I have other interests!”

“No, you don’t.” The eyeroll in Pete’s inflection is audible and unfair.

Weakly, Patrick attempts to intervene. “Uh…”

“I can make you how you were last night, Joe and Andy, too! It’ll be killer, you can find a bassist, a _real_ bassist, and everything will — you’ll be _happy!_ You’ll be perfect and you’ll be fucking _golden_ and everything will be okay.” Pete pauses, head cocked and looks at Patrick searchingly. He adds, heartbreakingly uncertain, “Won’t it?”

They stay like that for a lifetime, Pete’s nose inches from Patrick’s, Patrick’s crown crushed to the headboard like he can sink through it if he tries hard enough. Pete’s eyes are wide and hopeful, Patrick suspects his own are squinted and panicked. It would be so easy to nod and agree that it’s precisely what he wants; Gabe and his band and his tour. The thought of saying those words out loud makes his mouth feel ashy, and not just because he has yet to brush his teeth. (He makes a concentrated effort to breathe over Pete’s shoulder and not directly into his face.)

_Me and Pete._

It still hums through him, makes his teeth vibrate down to the roots like someone has taken a drill to the back of his skull. The way it felt to be on that stage, to be there _with Pete,_ with Joe and Andy, too. It felt less like a last minute wish-fulfilment and more like coming home, like some distant part of Patrick has been held in suspended animation, waiting for Pete. Like he’s been Han Solo, locked in carbonite until Pete broke it away. Like he’s _supposed_ to love Pete, sing for Pete, be around Pete.

“I can do that for you,” Pete says softly, his lips close enough that Patrick can feel the heat of them, can almost taste the herby sweetness of his kiss. There’s an ancient sadness about him, though, an aching loneliness that seems to pair with Patrick’s own. It makes Patrick’s guts feel shrivelled and cold, makes him want to scrape Pete into one place and hold him there, anchor him safely. “All you have to do is ask.”

Everything about this is ridiculous: Pete is a mystical being, he does not need to be rescued by eighteen-year-old non-musicians with shitty haircuts and questionable choice in facial hair. This time yesterday, Patrick didn’t believe in magic, now it seems he’s fallen hopelessly in love with it.

Patrick smiles bravely and touches his knuckles to Pete’s jaw. He is insurmountably terrified. He whispers, “I want the band.” Pete blinks at him slowly, his lip caught between his teeth as he smooths his thumbs along Patrick’s cheekbones. Before he can open his mouth, Patrick continues. “But I don’t need the prince.”

Pete looks suitably confused. “What?”

He doesn’t say anything else, which is terrible as Patrick is coerced into actually saying this stuff out loud. He takes a deep, steadying breath and allows it to rush out: “Look, dude, I don’t know if you noticed or not, but I do _not_ need you to find a prince for me,” courage shoved firmly to the sticking place, Patrick cups Pete’s lovely face in both hands, tilts up his chin and looks right into his eyes as he continues, “Haven’t you figured it out? It’s you, idiot, _you’re_ my prince.”

Pete chokes softly on his tongue. Patrick forces himself to continue before this strange sense of bravery can desert him.

“Last night was amazing. I can’t imagine any universe or any band that feels more amazing than that. What happened in the alleyway, what I said, that was all — it was _real_ and it was for you. I think,” he pauses and touches the pad of his thumb to the fullness of Pete’s lower lip, “I think maybe we’re meant to do this — _together.”_

“But…”

“No, I’m serious, you named us, you said _we_ were Fall Out Boy, you said it was _us.”_

Patrick has used up all of his courage, he falls silent and hopeless, staring at a fixed spot on the bedroom wall if it means he doesn’t have to watch Pete figure out a way to reject him. His nervous system is in overdrive, he doesn’t know if he should blush or pass out, if he should bounce his knee and bite his nails or get up and run back to Glenview and never look back. There should have been a guidebook, it seems wholly unfair to throw mere mortals into the deep end like this and, seriously, why isn’t Pete _saying_ anything?

“Patrick,” Pete says and Patrick immediately wishes he’d fall silent again. “Do you mean that?”

He’d like, very much, to lie right now. Instead, his big stupid mouth barrels ahead of its own accord. “Every word.”

“You barely know me,” Pete objects, but weakly, like he’s testing Patrick’s commitment to the whole ridiculous idea. “Be careful making wishes.”

“You’re right, though, I’ve spent my whole life making wishes,” Patrick is beginning to warm to his theme. “I’ve been so busy dreaming, I haven’t let myself _be_ , and last night, you showed me how. I mean — I don’t care about the whole Scene Patrick thing, I’m happy to look how I look if you promise to be the front man and you could probably practise the bass at least a little, but—”

“No, I’m being, like _super serious_ here, dude. _Be careful making wishes._ Because then they happen and then it’s a logistical _nightmare_ trying to unmake them. I know you think this is an awesome idea but I’m — maybe I’m not the best fit and, like, do you know how much paperwork is involved when you figure me out and change your mind?”

“If you don’t want to,” Patrick says, eyes stinging, “that’s fine, you can just say it, I—”

It’s hard to speak with Pete kissing him breathless, crushing him back into the bed and filling the room with heat and light and honey-sweet emotion. “I can be your John Cusack,” Pete declares into the depths of Patrick’s mouth.

“Oh, _please_ ,” Patrick gasps, groans, _dies_ , “you’re a Rob Lowe and you know it.”

“Gross,” says a third voice, one Patrick doesn’t recognize, from the vicinity of his bedroom door. He jumps upright, startled, and stares at Joe — _human Joe_ — over the golden curve of Pete’s shoulder. “Get a room.”

“We have one,” Patrick points out slowly. That is not the voice he imagined Joe would have. “You’re not… meowing?”

“Guess not,” Joe grins and ruffles his terrible bleach job. “Hey, do we have anything to eat that isn’t Newman’s Own? I’m fucking _starving.”_

“Vegan,” Andy’s voice echoes from the living room. “I think — I feel like I might be vegan.”

“I’ll be right out,” Patrick assures them, dazed. He blinks at Pete who smiles back, soft and golden. “I — is that a yes, then? Will you be in my shitty band? Will you be — with me?”

“Patrick,” says Pete, very sincerely. “I’ve granted a lot of wishes, done a damn good job of this whole Faerie Godperson thing, and no one has ever wished for _me._ You’re the first person I’d _want_ to do that with. This is the kind of thing that people write songs about, love songs, happily ever after below and above the waist. Nobody wants to hear anyone sing about tragedy.”

And Patrick? He kisses Pete slow and deep and tender and, when he pulls back, he whispers, “Dumbass. Who the hell would want to listen to songs like that?”

And they all lived happily ever after.

Below — and above — the waist.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all _so much_ for reading, I know it was way too long! If you wanted to leave kudos or comments, I would be eternally grateful, or come say hi on tumblr [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/sn1tchesandtalkers)
> 
> Please don't forget to check out the other works in the challenge, which you can find [right here!](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Onceuponapeterick)


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